When your server is located in a data center far away, it makes it difficult to walk over to the box and read the service tag off of it. Fortunately, the Service Tag is stored somewhere in the system BIOS, and is accessible with the ‘dmidecode’ utility.
[root@host ~]# dmidecode|grep "Serial Number"
Serial Number: 80NZV71
You’ll probably see several other serial numbers in there as well for things like your hard drives or other devices. The Dell shouldn’t be too difficult to pick out. I think they are always 7 digits and have letters in middle. There is lots of other interesting things in the ‘dmidecode’ output too, like the speed and type of each RAM module installed, and a description of all of the onboard devices (ie: video and network cards)
With Windows
Thanks to @kleinbaas who commented below how to do the same thing on a Windows machine:
C:\Documents and Settings\brandon>wmic bios get serialnumber SerialNumber GX245D1
Looks good. The Manpage is slightly less optimistic:
BUGS
More often than not, information contained in the DMI tables is inaccurate, incomplete or simply wrong.
However, it is certainly better than nothing, and if it gives the right answer at 3.45am when nobody is around to read the label, this is invaluable information! Thumbs up!
Cool, Not sure if I will need this but very cool to add to the list. Thanks!
‘dmidecode -s system-serial-number’ works for me as well.
Thank you for this cool command !!!
If (like me) you found this website (in Google) while looking for a way to get your Dell Service Tag number via the Windows command-line, here’s how you do it:
Type wmic bios get serialnumber in the command prompt on a Dell machine.
For more information, go to http://www.brightvisions.co.uk/IT-FAQ-s/Dell-Service-Tag-Command-Line.html
http://www.set8.net
How can you do this remotely?
you can do it via “ssh”